Using The "UN
Process" To Help

Organize A Massacre

by Edward S. Herman

Dissident Voice
February 18, 2003

The
U.S. leadership and public never seem embarrassed at beating up very tiny
countries, some about the size of Columbus, Ohio (Grenada), or using high tech
weaponry against defenseless people. This is odd, as the image of a bully is
not a positive one in the culture and the ideas of fair play and a level
playing field are also frequently encountered. Furthermore, the slaughter of
civilians and helpless soldiers is not something one would have thought would
sit well with people brought up in Western religious and enlightenment
traditions.

A
good part of the explanation lies in eye aversion. Photos of victims of the
ever-improving cluster bombs are almost never shown in the Free Press; the
famous and exceptional photo of the young Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm
attack didn't show burning flesh, only an uninjured person exhibiting intense
fear. Norman Solomon quotes Patrick Sloyan's study of U.S. and media treatment
of the Persian Gulf War, where "the Bush administration produced not a
single picture or video of anyone being killed...[which] left the world
presuming Desert Storm was a war without death." Marc Herold reports that
pictures of the end results of the Afghan bombing of at least 283 separate
villages in which civilians were killed are almost completely absent from the
news reports in U.S. mainstream media. This was another "clean" war
-- by propaganda service combined with Pentagon censorship.

There
is also a rapidly developing language of "surgical" and
"precision" bombing and "collateral damage" and
"tragic errors" designed to sanitize U.S. warfare in the public mind.
The media have adapted well to this new linguistics of apologetics.

Another
part of the explanation is the demonization process, which makes it urgent that
the evil force be exterminated and quickly. Civilian casualties are more
acceptable when striking people who are said to support or fail to remove the
demon, so we need not trouble ourselves over their pain, especially when we are
protected from seeing it. We may be sure, also, that the government and media
find civilians to be "willing executioners" only in target states,
and there even when their leaders are allegedly "dictators," but not,
for example, in Israel or the United States.

Demonization
is also often combined with threat inflation, so that the demon's capabilities
are frequently exaggerated, and thus the inequality of power is scanted and the
urgency of terminating the demon's power to do damage tends to overwhelm any
thought of unfairness and lack of proportionality.

Given
that this country is by definition fighting an "Operation Just Cause"
against the forces of evil, any notion of injustice in force imbalance or
application of advanced technology against peasants disappears. The evil force
must give way to the cause of justice. The enemy must surrender or be
exterminated. Thus, any deaths we inflict are really the fault of enemy leaders
who fail to take advantage of the option of surrender, and those civilians who
fail to remove them.

We
should recall also that this country is the self-appointed policeman of the
world, whose leaders have generously taken upon themselves the responsibility
for straightening things out wherever their services are needed (although they
are prepared to farm out this function to people like Pinochet, Suharto, Saddam
Hussein [in the 1980s] and Sharon, and local proxy forces such as the
Nicaraguan contras, Savimbi's Unita, and Al Qaeda [in the Afghan War in the
1980s]). We don't need a level playing field as between the police and criminals.

Wars
and one-sided massacres are also seen by the Bush leadership, and are portrayed
in the Free Press as games, with soldiers, aircraft carriers and missiles being
positioned, and bombs and missiles exploded like fire-crackers over Belgrade,
Kabul and Baghdad. Dan Ellsberg notes that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
have never fought in wars or seen mangled bodies: "That may be
related...to the fact that they are all enthusiastic about this video game that
they feel is about to be played, on the model of the way they see the Gulf War,
or Afghanistan, or Kosovo, where nearly all the people who die are adversaries,
and not Americans." In games, we root for our side to win and the enemy to
be crushed. The idea of a level playing field is easily suppressed when we are
urging on our team in a game.

The
media are occasionally upset at the imbalance of forces and unleveled playing
field. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968
they were aghast at the brutal use of force by a Great Power against puny
victims. Even more interesting was their concern over the unleveled playing
field in the election held by the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in 1984,
where the government's edge in access to the media and election resources was
harshly criticized. The media were not at all bothered by the even greater edge
of the murderous regime in El Salvador in 1982 and 1984, or Yeltsin's greater
edge in the Russian election of 1996. This double standard reflecting the
state's political agenda and following official signals is internalized and
institutionalized. The reporters are probably not even aware that it exists.

A
country as powerful and aggressive as the United States can even get the
"international community" and its institutions to serve the imperial
agenda. The United States was able to kill millions of Indochinese and use
chemical weapons of mass destruction on a large scale, with no noticeable
opposition from the UN or international community. As regards its client state
Indonesia, even during the years in which Indonesia invaded, occupied, and
committed virtual genocide in East Timor, in violation of UN rulings (weakened,
however, by U.S. bargaining on behalf of the genocidist), not only was nothing
done to punish Indonesia, it continued to receive a steady flow of gifts from a
World Bank-organized lending group. U.S. transnationals and officials --
including Bill Clinton -- were pleased with Suharto's rule, which was friendly
to foreign corporate interests and subservient to U.S. political guidance, even
if ruthless with the Indonesian, East Timorese and West Papuan citizenry. So
Suharto was free to exploit and massacre.

As
regards Saddam Hussein and Iraq, it is notorious, although hardly mentioned in
the Free Press, that the United States not only helped Saddam acquire chemical
weapons and means of their delivery in the 1980s, it actively worked to prevent
any international criticisms of his use of those weapons. (And by inference,
this country would have furiously opposed "disarming" Saddam, who was
at that time killing the right people.) U.S. power, therefore, had to reverse
itself after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, moving from protecting
Saddam and his use of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) to pretending
that his possession of those weapons was a fearsome threat. It even succeeded
in manipulating the UN into uniquely intensive sanctions and inspections
programs to deal with the alleged threat.

The Media's Outstanding War Propaganda Service

This
reversal was successful because the U.S. mainstream media did another superb
job of war-supportive propaganda service, and because U.S. power permitted a
further abusive manipulation of the UN. As regards the media performance, which
paralleled that during the Persian Gulf war, some of the main elements have
been the following:

1.
Virtual suppression of the history of active U.S. support of Saddam's
acquisition and use of chemical weapons in the 1980s, when he was far more
powerful than he is now. This helps avoid having to confront the question: How
can he be a threat now, in his much weaker state, when he was perceived as an
asset deserving of aid and protection earlier when he served U.S. purposes?

2.
Virtual suppression of the fact that the bombing during the 1991 war, the
sanctions regime, and inspections and associated destruction of weapons have
made Iraq very poor and militarily only a shadow of its power during the years
of U.S. support.

3.
Virtual suppression of the fact that high UNSCOM officials have declared that
at least 90-95 percent of Iraq's chemical weapons have been destroyed.

4.
Virtual suppression of the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has
repeatedly said that Iraq has no nuclear weapons or ongoing nuclear weapons
program.

5.
Virtual suppression of the fact that the sanctions regime imposed by the United
States and Britain has been responsible for the death of over a million Iraqis,
including over 500,000 children, and constitutes a major war crime.

6.
Virtual suppression of the fact that the United States is responsible for at
least three major violations of Security Council Resolution 687 under which
inspections have been carried out: (a) it has openly proclaimed that sanctions
will continue until there is a regime change, which was never part of 687; (b)
it has imposed "no-fly zones" and engaged in numerous related bombing
attacks on Iraq, although these are nowhere sanctioned by 687; (c) they have
used inspections as a means of spying to obtain information unrelated to the
purpose of 687 but useful in military attacks on Iraq.

7.
Virtual suppression of the fact that while 687 calls for the elimination of
weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East, the United States has
made no effort to enforce this on Israel.

8.
Virtual suppression of the fact that Israel is in violation of many more
Security Council resolutions than Iraq, and that these are unenforceable
because the United States is in a close alliance with Israel. So Israel can
acquire nuclear weapons for "self defense," but Iraq cannot do the
same, by virtue of U.S. selective choice.

9.
Virtual suppression of the fact that Iraq only used chemical weapons when under
U.S. protection, while failing to use them in 1991 when in conflict with the
United States. Suppressing this is important as it points up the fact that Iraq
couldn't use WMD offensively even if it had them, because both the United
States and Israel have far greater capability and Iraq's use would be suicidal.

10.
Virtual suppression of the fact that the UN and aid agencies predict that the
U.S. high tech war will cause a humanitarian crisis among the already highly
vulnerable Iraqi civilian population. This follows a long pattern of the U.S.
mainstream media averting eyes from the human costs of U.S. wars on target
country populations.

11.
Virtual suppression of the fact that an unprovoked attack and invasion of a
country is "the supreme international crime differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
whole," as described by Robert Jackson, U.S. representative at the
Nuremberg trials. It is also the very action that the UN and UN Charter were
designed to prevent, and it would be in straightforward violation of that Charter.

12.
Instead of facts and context along the lines of the above, the mainstream media
have provided a steady stream of administration claims and opinions, many
highly repetitive, unenlightening and serially shown to misrepresent facts,
along with voluminous data on military plans and dispositions. This has been a
display of "press release journalism" that represents a public sphere
virtually destroyed by propaganda service to a war-dedicated government.

The "UN Process"

Although
the Bush-Cheney regime openly announced its intention to remove Saddam Hussein
by force, it allowed itself to be persuaded to bring the UN into the picture.
The point of this deviation from straightforward unilateralism was quite
explicitly to give the attack -- which would constitute flagrant aggression and
a violation of the most essential principle in the UN Charter -- an aura of
legality and a sense that it was not a purely unilateral or Anglo-Saxon action.
As Thomas Friedman put it, "The Bush team discovered that the best way to
legitimize its overwhelming might -- in a war of choice -- was not by simply
imposing it, but by channeling it through the UN"

It
was thought that by intensifying the inspections process, making it
outlandishly intrusive and virtually forcing Saddam to prove a negative, a war
could be expedited with Security Council approval -- that Saddam would either
turn down the new inspections system, or that he would soon be found delinquent
in one of a hundred ways that could be interpreted as "material
breach." Meanwhile, by intensive propaganda and "diplomacy"
(i.e., bribery and bullying) it should be possible to get Security Council
consent for war, or at least mobilize a respectable "coalition" cover
to support the attack.

This
system has its humorous aspects. One is that the U.S. leaders and pundit
supporters have been very up front about the fact that they are damned well
going to bomb and massacre no matter what, so that the resort to the UN is
purely a facade and cover. For the Bush officials the "UN process" is
one of getting UN backing for the planned war, by hook or by crook. It has
nothing to do with consultations or substantive multilateralism, or with any
decision role for anybody but the Bush warriors. When an administration
official says, noting French and German constraints, that "We haven't
given up on the UN process," all he means is that he hasn't given up on the
effort to get approval for the U.S. war -- the "process" is USING the
UN to obtain a legal-moral cover, nothing more.

The
"UN process" has worked well so far, although not to absolute bully
perfection. It has worked wonderfully well if we consider that the UN SHOULD
have mobilized to actively oppose the announced U.S. aggression. Instead, it
has supinely taken the road of accommodating but slowing down the aggressor.
Although the sanctions-inspections regime was the aggressor's own concoction,
under U.S. pressure the UN members have continued to pretend that it reflects
the world's view that Saddam is a ferocious threat to world peace who needs
this special treatment. They have, therefore, cooperated with the aggressor in
creating the more intensive, intrusive and "prove a negative" system
of inspections, thereby implicitly justifying the aggressor's claim that this
was terribly important and that everybody agreed to this; and they have
established demands and conditions that would help the aggressor prove that his
aggression was needed. THIS WAS THE GREATEST ACT OF APPEASEMENT SINCE THE
ACCOMMODATION TO HITLER AT MUNICH.

The
imperfection came about because Saddam groveled and allowed the inspectors to
come in even under the intrusive terms of Security Council Resolution 1441, and
because, under the pressure of mass global disapproval of the forthcoming
invasion and its uncertain but almost sure negative impact on the global
community, France, Germany, Russia and China have dragged their feet in giving
a go ahead to a U.S.-British attack. But the bully is stepping up the pressure,
and France and Germany, while still resisting, are showing signs of weakening.
This suggests the likelihood of a "compromise" second resolution that
the bully will interpret as a go-ahead for massacre.

For
the bully, the stakes are too high, the cruise missiles and other forces are in
place, an election looms ahead, Sharon and his friends are eager for massacre,
and the game must be played. The bully may soon start bombing even without a successful
"UN process." The only thing really in his way is the growing
upheaval from below, which needs to reach a still higher critical mass, and
actions to strengthen political backbones and constitute a serious brake on the
planned aggression.

Edward S. Herman is Professor
Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania,
and a contributor to Z Magazine. He
is author of The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Global Capitalism
with Robert McChesney (Cassell, 1997), Triumph of the Market: Essays on
Economics, Politics, and the Media (South End Press, 1995), and Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media with Noam Chomsky (South
End Press, 1988). This article first appeared in Swans Commentary (http://www.swans.com/main.shtml).
Posted with authorís permission.